@@ America go to hell @@
Arash
September 10, 2003
WORLD OPINION
Foreign Views of U.S. Darken Since Sept. 11
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
BERLIN, Germany - In the two years since Sept. 11, 2001, the view of the
United States as a victim of terrorism that deserved the world's sympathy
and support has given way to a widespread vision of America as an imperial
power that has defied world opinion through unjustified and unilateral use
of military force.
"A lot of people had sympathy for Americans around the time of 9/11, but
that's changed," said Cathy Hearn, 31, a flight attendant from South Africa,
expressing a view commonly heard in many countries. "They act like the big
guy riding roughshod over everyone else."
Washington once hoped to develop closer relations with Indonesia, the most
populous predominantly Muslim country, but respect for the United States
among Indonesians has plummeted. Protesters gathered last month with signs
saying, "America go to hell" and "Don't mess with Islam."
http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2003/09/11/international/opin184.jpg
In interviews by Times correspondents from Africa to Europe to Southeast
Asia, one point emerged clearly: The war in Iraq has had a major impact on
public opinion, which has moved generally from post-9/11 sympathy to
post-Iraq antipathy, or at least to disappointment over what is seen as the
sole superpower's inclination to act pre-emptively, without either
persuasive reasons or United Nations approval.
To some degree, the resentment is centered on the person of President Bush,
who is seen by many of those interviewed, at best, as an ineffective
spokesman for American interests and, at worst, as a gunslinging cowboy
knocking over international treaties and bent on controlling the world's
oil, if not the entire world.
Foreign policy experts point to slowly developing fissures, born at the end
of the cold war, that exploded into view in the debate leading up to the
Iraq war. "I think the turnaround was last summer, when American policy
moved ever more decisively toward war against Iraq," said Josef Joffe,
co-editor of the German weekly Die Zeit. "That's what triggered the
counteralliance of France and Germany and the enormous wave of hatred
against the United States."
The subject of America in the world is of course complicated, and the
nation's battered international image could improve quickly in response to
events. The Bush administration's recent turn to the United Nations for help
in postwar Iraq may represent such an event.
Even at this low point, millions of people still see the United States as a
beacon and support its policies, including the war in Iraq, and would, given
the chance, be happy to become Americans themselves.
Some regions, especially Europe, are split in their view of America's role:
The governments and, to a lesser extent, the public in former Soviet-bloc
countries are much more favorably disposed to American power than the
governments and the public in Western Europe, notably France and Germany.
In Japan, a strong American ally that feels insecure in the face of a
hostile, nuclear-armed North Korea, there may be doubts about the wisdom of
the American war on Iraq. But there seem to be far fewer doubts about the
importance of American power generally to global stability.
In China, while many ordinary people express doubts about the war in Iraq,
anti-American feeling has diminished since Sept. 11, 2001, and there seems
to be greater understanding and less instinctive criticism of the United
States by government officials and intellectuals. The Chinese leadership has
largely embraced America's "war on terror."
Still, a widespread and fashionable view is that the United States is a
classically imperialist power bent on controlling global oil supplies and on
military domination.
That mood has been expressed in different ways by different people, from the
hockey fans in Montreal who boo the American national anthem to the high
school students in Switzerland who do not want to go to the United States as
exchange students because America is not "in." Even among young people, it
is not difficult to hear strong denunciations of American policy and sharp
questioning of American motives.
"America has taken power over the world," said Dmitri Olshansky, 25, a
literary crtic and writer in Moscow. "It's a wonderful country, but it
seized power. It's ruling the world. America's attempts to rebuild all the
world in the image of liberalism and capitalism are fraught with the same
dangers as the Nazis taking over the world."
A Frenchman, Jean-Charles Pogram, 45, a computer technician, said: "Everyone
agrees on the principles of democracy and freedom, but the problem is that
we don't agree with the means to achieve those ends. The United States can't
see beyond the axiom that force can solve everything, but Europe, because of
two world wars, knows the price of blood."
Lydia Adhiamba, a 20-year-old student at the Institute of Advanced
Technology in Nairobi, Kenya, said the United States "wants to rule the
whole world, and that's why there's so much animosity to the U.S."
The major English language daily newspaper in Indonesia, The Jakarta Post,
recently ran a prominent article titled, "Why moderate Muslims are annoyed
with America," by Sayidiman Suryohadiprojo, a prominent figure during the
Suharto years.
"If America wants to become a hegemonic power, it is rather difficult for
other nations to prevent that," he wrote. "However, if America wants to be a
hegemonic power that has the respect and trust of other nations, it must be
a benign one, and not one that causes a reaction of hate or fear among other
nations."
Bush as Salesman
Crucial to global opinion has been the failure of the Bush administration to
persuade large segments of the public of its justification for going to war
in Iraq.
In striking contrast to opinion in the United States, where polls show a
majority believe there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda
terrorists, the rest of the world remains skeptical.
That explains the enormous difference in international opinion toward
American military action in Afghanistan in the months after Sept. 11, which
seemed to have tacit approval as legitimate self-defense, and toward
American military action in Iraq, which is seen as the arbitrary act of an
overbearing power.
Perhaps the strongest effect on public opinion has been in Arab and Muslim
countries. Even in relatively moderate Muslim countries like Indonesia and
Turkey, or countries with large Muslim populations, like Nigeria, both polls
and interviews show sharp drops in approval of the United States.
In unabashedly pro-American countries like Poland, perhaps the staunchest
American ally on Iraq after Britain, polls show 60 percent of the people
oppose the government's decision to send 2,500 troops to Iraq.
For many people, the issue is not so much the United States as it is the
Bush administration, and what is seen as its arrogance. In this view, a
different set of policies and a different set of public statements from
Washington could have resulted in a different set of attitudes.
"The point I would make is that with the best will in the world, President
Bush is a very poor salesman for the United States, and I say that as
someone who has no animus against him or the United States," said Philip
Gawaith, a financial communications consultant in London. "Whether it's Al
Qaeda or Afghanistan, people have just felt that he's a silly man, and
therefore they are not obliged to think any harder about his position."
Trying to Define 'Threat'
But while the public statements of the Bush administration have not played
well in much of the world, many analysts see deeper causes for the rift that
has opened. In their view, the Iraq war has not so much caused a new
divergence as it has highlighted and widened one that existed since the end
of the cold war. Put bluntly, Europe needs America less now that it feels
less threatened.
Indeed, while the United States probably feels more threatened now than in
1989, when the cold war ended, Europe is broadly unconvinced of any imminent
threat.
"There were deep structural forces before 9/11 that were pushing us apart,"
said John J. Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University
of Chicago and the author of "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics." "In the
absence of the Soviet threat or of an equivalent threat, there was no way
that ties between us and Europe wouldn't be loosened.
"So, when the Bush Administration came to power, the question was whether it
would make things better or worse, and I'd argue that it made them worse."
"In the cold war you could argue that American unilateralism had no cost,"
Professor Mearsheimer continued. "But as we're finding out with regard to
Iraq, Iran and North Korea, we need the Europeans and we need institutions
like the U.N. The fact is that the United States can't run the world by
itself, and the problem is, we've done a lot of damage in our relations with
allies, and people are not terribly enthusiastic about helping us now."
Recent findings of international surveys illustrate those divergences.
A poll of 8,000 people in Europe and the United States conducted by the
German Marshall Fund of the United States and Compagnia di São Paolo of
Italy found Americans and Europeans agreeing on the nature of global threats
but disagreeing sharply on how they should be dealt with.
Most striking was a difference over the use of military force, with 84
percent of Americans but only 48 percent of Europeans supporting force as a
means of imposing international justice.
In Europe overall, the proportion of people who want the United States to
maintain a strong global presence fell 19 points since a similar poll last
year, from 64 percent to 45 percent, while 50 percent of respondents in
Germany, France and Italy express opposition to American leadership.
Many of the difficulties predated Sept. 11, of course. Eberhard
Sandschneider, director of the German Council on Foreign Relations, listed
some in a recent paper: "Economic disputes relating to steel and farm
subsidies; limits on legal cooperation because of the death penalty in the
United States; repeated charges of U.S. `unilateralism' over actions in
Afghanistan; and the U.S. decisions on the ABM Treaty, the Kyoto Protocol,
the International Criminal Court and the Biological Weapons Protocol."
"One could conclude that there is today a serious question as to whether
Europe and the United States are parting ways," Mr. Sandschneider writes.
From this point of view, as he and others have said, the divergence will not
be a temporary phenomenon but permanent.
A recent survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project showed a growth of
anti-American sentiment in many non-European parts of the world. It found,
for example, that only 15 percent of Indonesians have a favorable impression
of the United States, down from 61 percent a year ago.
Indonesia may be especially troubling to American policy makers, who have
hoped that, as a country with an easy-going attitude toward religion, it
would emerge as a kind of pro-American Islamic model.
But since Sept. 11, a virulent group of extremists known as Jemaah Islamiyah
has gained strength, attacking in Bali and Jakarta and making the country so
insecure that President Bush may skip it during an Asian trip planned for
next month.
One well-known mainstream Indonesian Muslim leader, Din Syamsuddin, an
American-educated vice president of a Islamic organization that claims 30
million members, calls the United States the "king of the terrorists" and
refers to President Bush as a "drunken horse."
This turn for the worse has occurred despite a $10 million program by the
State Department in which speakers and short films showing Muslim life in
the United States were sent last fall to Muslim countries, including
Indonesia.
A Residue of Good Will
Still, broad sympathy for the United States exists in many areas. Students
from around the world clamor to be educated in America. The United States as
a land of opportunity remains magnetic.
Some analysts point out that the German Marshall Fund study actually showed
a great deal of common ground across the Atlantic.
"Americans and Europeans still basically like each other, although such
warmth has slipped in the wake of the Iraq war," Ronald Asmus, Philip P.
Everts and Pierangelo Isernia, analysts from the United States, the
Netherlands and Italy, respectively, wrote in an article explaining the
findings. "Americans and Europeans do not live on different planets when it
comes to viewing the threats around them."
But there is little doubt that the planets have moved apart. Gone are the
days, two years ago, when 200,000 Germans marched in Berlin to show
solidarity with their American allies, or when Le Monde, the most
prestigious French newspaper, could publish a large headline, "We Are All
Americans."
More recently, Jean Daniel, the editor of the weekly Nouvel Observateur,
published an editorial entitled, "We Are Not All Americans."
For governments in Eastern Europe, Sept. 11 has forced a kind of test of
loyalties. Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Poland have
felt themselves caught between the United States and the European Union,
which they will soon be joining.
Here, too, the war in Iraq seems to have been the defining event, the
division of Europe into "new" and "old" halves, defined by their willingness
to support the American-led war.
Most Eastern European countries side with the European Union majority on
such questions as the International Criminal Court, which is opposed by the
Bush administration, while helping in various ways with the Iraq war. Poland
and Romania have sent troops and Hungary has permitted training of Iraqis at
a military base there.
But even if the overall mood in the former Soviet Bloc remains largely
pro-American, recent polls have shown some slippage in feelings of
admiration.
"We would love to see America as a self-limiting superpower," said Janusz
Onyszkiewicz, a former Polish defense minister.
Perhaps the administration's decision to turn to the United Nations to seek
a mandate for an international force in Iraq reflects a new readiness to
exercise such restraint. The administration appears to have learned that
using its power in isolation can get very expensive very quickly.
But the road to recovering global support is likely to be a long one for a
country whose very power - political, economic, cultural, military - makes
it a natural target of criticism and envy.
Even in Japan, where support for America remains strong, the view of the
United States as a bully has entered the popular culture. A recent cartoon
showed a character looking like President Bush in a Stars and Stripes vest
pushing Japanese fishermen away from a favorite spot, saying, "I can fish
better."
* Contributing to this report were James Brooke, Frank Bruni, Alan Cowell,
Ian Fisher, Joseph Kahn, Clifford Krauss, Marc Lacey, Jane Perlez, Craig S.
Smith and Michael Wines.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/11/international/11OPIN.html?ex=1064315798&ei=1&en=ef3fbf2c7d873a66